I've had a line from the science-fiction/thriller writer William Gibson stuck in my head for days now, having been jarred loose from whatever neuron had encoded it last year:
"The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed."
This strikes me as a brilliant assessment of our world, with "brilliant" masking various missing modifiers such as pithy, insightful, cutting, and optimistic. I thought of it on Thursday when, driving back from a meeting in St. Paul across the frontier between the suburbs and the exurbs (a line you can pretty much see somewhere around Airlake Airport in Lakeville), I heard a story on NPR about the mounting pressure on many Asian and African governments to feed their populations even as rice gets too expensive to serve as the dietary staple. Uneven distribution, all right. This New York Times article is a good summary of this dismal phenomenon. - and a glimpse into the lives of those who have no grasp on the future, and nearly none on the present:
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.